Toolkit Tags

The North Florida Land Trust has used 26 natural resource criteria to map and prioritize strategic conservation objectives in a seven-county region. The resulting North Florida Conservation Priorities map offers a quantitative guide of conservation values, informing acquisition and management priorities in this area.

The Pacific Forest Trust is a pioneer of approaches and standards used to create forest climate policies including carbon emissions reductions or offset projects which harness and protect the natural ability of forests to accumulate and hold carbon, acting as carbon “sinks” and providing essential climate benefits.

In New York, Scenic Hudson is conserving land in 82 communities in ten counties along the Hudson River to buffer against future sea level rise impacts. By targeting key properties for acquisition efforts, this land trust is working to ensure that natural processes such as marsh migration can continue to provide valuable ecological services as well as mitigate the effects of rising waters throughout the estuary.

The Peconic Land Trust’s Shellfisher Preserve is a collaborative enterprise that combines conservation with aquaculture activities to raise funds for property stewardship and further research on the Peconic Bay Estuary.

The South Kingstown Land Trust (SKLT)’s vulnerability assessment and resulting conservation planning efforts identify organizational goals, natural resource assets, and management priorities. This iterative adaptive management approach enables the land trust to focus stewardship activities on critical ecosystems while allowing the flexibility to acknowledge uncertainties and revisit results. By integrating climate change adaptation considerations into conservation planning, SKLT is able to address changing environmental conditions using an informed and methodical approach, and to plan future acquisitions and restoration projects based on their stewardship objectives.

The Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy (SWMLC) focuses land management and acquisition efforts on maintaining and improving natural communities. When working to support ecological health, climate change is an import, but at times divisive concern. By focusing on resiliency, SWMLC is able to concentrate management planning discussions and implementation projects on ways to ensure that habitats are able to persist through constantly changing conditions.